It's the same with paper

Financial records get shredded after 10 years, or so, so why not all other records?

Where I work we store offsite backups in destruction date order, as they are far more likely to be destroyed than accessed!

Also, the chances are, if you don;t need a backup in the first couple of years, you'll never need to access it.

Also, as time goes on, all your historical 'tapes' (I use tape as a unit of currency rather than a physical media) will fit onto a single, super capacity future tape format, so the on going transfer will be a single tape at a time.

Are we buying into the keep everything for ever trap, and what happens with 'Big Data' which doesn't even get backed up?

On this logic

Fatties should receive tax breaks.

They offer 2 advantages over people who exercise:

1) Less CO2 produced, due to no exercise

2) they operate as highly efficient carbon capture devices.

Providing they are buried and not cremated when they die, they are an ideal carbon capture and storage resource :-)

We like it

We use Liferay extensively at the place I work at. It's used for end customer products, and we contribute towards the code pool.

Given the prices charged for WebSphere/Weblogic and the like, it's no wonder that Liferay is doing well!!

Perhaps we've become cold and heartless

After trying to work with medical people on their requirements, and noting their entire lack of empathy with how software needs to be developed?

Or, as my wife recently said to a overly empathic nurse - 'Stop simpering over me like I'm a small child, and talk to me like an adult'!!

I love the agile bit

Have any of us ever come across any public body that can work in an agile way? Their bureaucracy is so deep and so ingrained that agile just can't/won't work for them.

Agile requires a highly developed, and knowledgeable requirements management person, who can have firm needs, and knows the end result, and can stop their stakeholders from gold plating.

Scope creep is so endemic in most government projects, that they often times founder under the scales of creep employed.

The problem is

As soon as your corporate data (esp personal data covered by the DPA) hits a personal device, the corporate loses control , but not responsibility.

If you fire a person who has synched their Outlook to their phone, and you fire them, you immediately have personal records (covered by the DPA) on a device that is not owned by an employee.

Even if they are still employed you have not rights (unless you get a court order) to examine he device, or to ensure data is deleted off it.

This is the huge Achilles heel in BYOD.

No media streaming = fail

If it won't replace my 8 year old Topfield and my WD TV Live then it's not a win for me.

I need a box that works on terrestrial, records 2 channels, and watches a 3rd, allows me to see all UK catchup TV services, and works as a media streamer.

How on earth

Can an i3 processor laptop be called an ultrabook??!!

British drama terrible

Which will be why Downton Abbey is up for more Emmy's than I can shake a stick at then?!!

Nearly There

This is just what I need, but please can I have more than 4 network connections, and an ADSL router built in?.

Currently I have 4 on my ADSL router and another 4 on my NetGear Powerline hub, and it works a treat.

I have to plug in Xbox, WD TV Live Box, BD Player, TV plus NAS. I'd rather save WiFi bandwidth for laptops etc, so hard points are good for me.

And when they are away from the 'Office' in Westminster and are required to work offline on documents - how are slabs going to help them then?

Oh, I know, they print them out, rather than having a laptop with reasonable storage, where they could work offline.

Slabs - great for reading the daily paper f-all use for much else in the business world!!

I thought everyone knew

That outsourcing to India, does not cost less anymore. Yes the day rate you pay a developer is lower, but the management overheads of running offshore, and the sheer depth of detail design specs need to be written to quickly negates any saving in day rate.

Having been through this with a company I know first hand.

As for 24hr working, put a night shift on on the UK!! Or are they referring to taking advantage of poor worker treatment in the sub continent?

Does anyone else get the Private Cloud from MS ad in this comment section as well??!!!

Socail Media Usage

Says more about managers at public authorities than it does about people!!

All public authorities have acceptable usage policies, defining what employees can and can't do on works time.

If someone breaks the rules it's up to the manager to sort it out.

Unfortunately a lot (not all) of public authority managers are not very good managers.

Respect through force?

You can't respect through force, but you can get compliance.

I'll settle for compliance!

For all the folks banging on about the use of lethal force - nothing living was killed, therefore the force was not lethal QED.

In that respect, if the guy had run it over with his truck (he must own a 'truck') then that too should be classed as using lethal force.

Tax payers

Come out even, as the fine is paid back to the tax payers.

Until the ICO can force public bodies to sack people fines are the only way to get their attention, unless anyone has a batter idea?

Use an XBox as a PVR

Not until they make it much quieter!!

Read the small print

It's an additional 16% off the already discounted rate.

Although I do agree Open Source should be where they NHS is at.

Neither happy nor sad. Although reading the article it seems to suggest that the NHS has a 'shortfall' of licenses, so I'd rather spend money getting the correct licenses, than getting sued for punitive licenses should MS decide to audit the NHS!!

I wonder if it was made from

Applewood?

I must be the only one..................

who sees this a positive. 2G as not everyone has 3G in their area. Not supporting a plethora of differing comms methods broadband, powerline etc) makes life easy.

Good use of existing and stable technology. Doesn't get away from the new meter issue, and install times, but (and I work in the mobile data/telco data sector) I would be OK with this.

Awesome replacement for compact casette tapes

I have 2 portable players, one a recorder player, and a HiFi unit.

All used until recently. As someone else mentioned the ability to record in digital, at reasonable quality was great, and I used it until recently, when I bought a Zoom portable solid state recorded.

I still have all the mixes from my old digital 8 tracks band recordings from the lates 90s/early noughties on MD.

The lack of proper computer hook up stalled their use for me.

RIP

Tried it, failed it, and might try it again!!

We did a new project for a customer and bought 2 dual quad core CPU boxes, plenty of RAM and disk, and VM Server, to run a multi web server site on (open source OS).

The next project we went back to separate metal, as it was a damn sight cheaper than buying the same processing power in a bigger model up chassis.

As for the power argument that was also a little moot, as we were comparing 2 bigger boxes with dual PSUs with 4 smaller boxes running single CPUs, so the draw was not much different, when actually measured going into the boxes. The web servers also took up the same amount of rack space, so no wins there either. Other than the ease of throwing up a new VM, there's nothing in it.

On top of that we have just discovered that one of our offices is running 'x' VMs with paid for OS's and have had to spend more than £20k on additional servers lics due to uncontrolled OS deployment. That's the bit of VM world that they forget to tell you about!!

No heat without fire!

I just wish I could stand in the middle of our data centre, with no aircon and it be silent and not cooking the chips as well!!!

They must remove all fans from their product placed Dell servers, and have water cooling thereby not needing aircon either, plus they must all be equipped with SSDs.

I wish I had their computing budget!!

That's what happens

when a large number of people with criminal records are housed in a single building!!

It never rains when it pours

Especially when the pouring is from the aircom overflow tray above the large IBM piece of tin that ran 15 warehouses (the real kind, not data ones!), spread across Europe.

It took 4 days to get the system back up, and then senior management suddenly saw the sense in spending several million on a separate site system.

They lost £5m per day.

Or the 'meat' error in the same company where the clerk pushed through a quarters VAT payments a day early and lost the company IRO £3m in VAT, on an entire warehouse of fags an booze.

CSC

Does it still sand for Can't Support Computers?

Every dealing I have with them leaves me with a growing feeling of incompetence!!

Royal Mail and Delivery?

Given they can't deliver 35g letters on time, how do they intend to suceed here?

Yep

That's why we, when knowing we have to deal with outsourced customer IT depts, put our prices up!

The amount of grief to implement all but the simplest IT projects via an outsourcing organisation is too painful to behold!

As the saying goes - 'Accountants, know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.'!

On the bleeding edge!

As a Head of Dept, with a multi disciplinary background, in a telecomms software shop, I see the result of this day in and day out. We are a small organisation, so I prize (and absolutely must have) people with multidisciplinary backgrounds.

There seems to be a huge gap in this area between small/medium companies and large organisations.

It's so bad that when we install into a customers site (tier one UK Telcos) that they have to have rooms of people (firewall team , network team, server team, virtualisation team, DB team and so on) to implement a straight forward 3 tier web app. I turn up on my own and can talk rings around the lot of them!!

In my experience outsourcing also increases this problem by an order of magnitude.

Can I get a .god domain

So I can block all the god squad nonsense???

Redundant

So all the power of the SAN, to do snap copies, multi path redundancy and so on is replicated in a NAS. I don't think so.

We moved from direct attached storage some time ago, and never looked back. We had nothing but issue with Direct Attached SCSI disk arrays and the like, but the SANs we have have been fault tolerant and far speedier.

Don't get me wrong NAS, Direct Attached storage and so on, have their places, but a SAN serves a specific purpose in an enterprise (even a small one like mine).